AGGTELEK

TEXTS

ATTITUDE AT PLAY

Alex Brahim

In a metaphoric sense, Aggtelek's work could probably correspond to the dialectics between the spelling and the phonetic resonance of its name. Concrete, synthetic, visually skocking, digestable but not exempt from friction. And at the same time, highly evocative of rather subjective references —those a practically unknown Hungarian word (the name of a town) could arouse in the reader or spectator. Art, television, telekinesis, speculative projections of a digitalist or sci-fi sort, and a feeling of having a phonetic knot in your throat. Nothing could be closer or farther from reality.

The truth is that Xandro Vallés and Gemma Perales' work establishes a productive, unproductive, sensory and aesthetical seesaw that is as tangible as it is immaterial, as avant-garde (if we may still use the term in this day and age) as it is traditional in its elements, and basically artisanal in its making; so precise in its features as it is speculative in the multiple trails it feeds on and to which it refers to.

Their work starts to develop from actions in which the artists interact with space and its materials by building, destroying and on-the-go rebuilding sculptures, characters, objects and the stage itself, using mainly cardboard boxes, adhesive tape and paint. Architectures, monuments and ephimeral inhabitants in a perpetual synapsis are videotaped, while the authors play with them alternating subtlelty and violence, attention and recklessness, endurance tests and leaps into the void of evasion; making movement the only constant in a supremely personal research work that embraces performance and stage arts, object production and scenography. In a modern code and with a clear reference to silent films, their stories wink at art trends as disparate as the Arte Povera, Actionism or Pop Art. Amid this evolution of videographed situations (where the recording of the process is a product rather than a document) emerge sculptures, photographies, paintings, assemblages, and installations such as derived products —anchorage nodes of its continuous living creation, narrated in a code of conceptual playfulness.

Starting off with an aesthetics of accumulation combined with cleaning processes, Aggtelek develops their own model of work, structuring cycles of life and death, construction and demolition, making of their multidisciplinary corpus an expanded projection of contaminated mechanisms. Mechanisms insofar as their work does not distinguish between processes and products, but rather presents itself as a continuum. Thus, contaminated beyond the development of pieces in certain hardwares, Aggtelek does not have parcels to differentiate disciplines, but rather a space that unfolds so that they all adjoin, fuse, interact and superimpose or, as someone said before, explode. Hence the eloquent load of fractured nominations that some of their projects receive: Cartoonformance, Boxplot, Lightfall Post-Collage; its pro-active character: Sculpturing the Performance, Performing the Sculpture, Let's Perform Everything, Performing the Scenography; or its descriptive order of something so delimited as temporarily sequenced: Sculpture Essay number x or y, or Polymorphous Row-Ephemeral Playground, for instance.

It is the aforementioned explosion, or expansion, which gives way to an aesthetical-ideological order that is alternate and variable, where the diversity of dialogues, projections and interrelations is compact as well as infinite, and paves the way to three dialectic levels, depending on the point of view: the spectator's external reading of the artwork as a whole, already evocative of heterogeneous narratives and plastic codes; the way the artists (understood as part of the piece but now separated from the whole) relate to the process, still from the spectator’s view; and the inevitable connection between the artists in relation to their own process, which they express publicly in the formulation of their work. More over, such levels have been re-expanded by Aggtelek just after Performing the Scenography, with the appartition of characters from a parallel reality, creatures that come to life between boxes during the artists’ abscence to live their own experiences, of a rather narrative nature. Likewise, in their more recent pieces, such as the Second Sculpture Essay, the personal link of the authors grows to hyperbolic proportions when they enter the dwellings, getting into a lower tempo —the real time in which they are themselves— to carry out little gesture actions with materials and body fluids, as a wink to the traditional notion of artistic performance.

Thus, in this multi-level enclave converge a passion for detail and multiple little things, the vertiginous need to alternate events, and the prejudice-free search for profusion. This opens a scene of diffused limits where there is enough room for sculpture, scenographic managment, performance, painting, graffiti, illustration and textual work, periodically suffused with videodance and dramatic arts, and, more recently, with narrative experiments and audiovisual hypertext.

It is at the dawn and bawns of this whole that Aggtelek's artists, androids and their artwork de-re-configure, indissolublely linking themselves to the tools, materials, gestures and actions in the axis that constitutes the time line. It is that over-de-re-structuring, that of doing and undoing without any apparent beginning or end, which sets the starting point of its creative cycle, where the artists profess organic entities that are reelaborated, like their pieces, in concentric circles, or rather spirals that move forward chronologically infected with a vigorous, reflexive attitude, allegedly chaotic but carefuly and reasonably structured, making the regeneration of the residue the raw material of the genesis.

It is that embracing and processual delight which lays the foundations of their proposal, as well as it bears witness of a vitalist connection with artistic production, has given Aggtelek a differentiating originality that appropriates and reinterprets with a natural honesty all sorts of explicit referents, exogenus and artistic ones alike. “It isn’t the materials that are important, it is the attitude”, they quote Alighiero Boetti in the inauguration of the 2nd Sculpture Essay. It is precisely with their attitude that Aggtelek shows how to take the authorship trade seriously without clashing with a ludic approach, that which enables the artist (and the spectator) the enjoyment as a formal priority in an ideological hierarchy based on commitment. It is also this attitude what constitutes Aggtelek’s stamp, their particular aesthetics ethics, in their combats processes to play the battle of art.